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Vienna, the second-largest city in the German-speaking world, had become a meeting place earlier this week for software and service engineers who explore the crossroads of software architecture, DevOps processes and continuous-* (software development, integration, delivery) approaches. The 1st Vienna Software Seminar had mixed business and academic participants and has been of particular interest to architects and practitioners who want to migrate applications or related processes into cloud environments and are in need of relevant methods and tools. With its interactive agile format and focus on break-out groups, the seminar was structured so that topics could be discussed in detail and grouped by interest. This report summarises the four-day event including some highlights from selected discussions from a participant perspective.

Service scheduling and task placement within large-scale clusters is receiving a lot of interest in the cloud community at present. Moreover, service scheduling is one of the keystones of our recently kicked off ACeN project and we finally got a chance to experiment with the technology that is currently a frontrunner in this area – Apache Mesos. As Mesos provides much more control of service placement than current available built-in IaaS schedulers it elegantly addresses many problems in data centers such as task data locality, efficient resource utilization or efficient load variation accommodation. This blogpost describes Mesos architecture, its basic workflow and explains why we think it’s a big deal also in the cloud context.

In the previous article we defined use cases for an OpenStack implementation according to the usage scenario in which the OpenStack environment is deployed. In this part of the Dependability Modeling article series we will show how these use cases relate to functions and services provided by the OpenStack environment and create a set of dependabilities between use cases, functions, services and system components. From this set we will draw the dependency graph and make the impact of component outages computable.

Construct dependency table

The dependency graph can be constructed if we define which functions, services and components allow provision of a use case. In the example below (Fig. 1) we defined the system architecture components, services and functions which allow to create, delete or update details of a Telco Account (account of mobile end user). Since these operations are provided within virtual machines, VM User Management and VM Security Management functions provide availability of this use case. Therefore we draw a column which contains these functions. Because these functions need a User Management, SSH & Password Management service in each VM in order to operate, we draw a second column which contains the required services. Another column is constructed which tells the system components required in order to deliver the required services.

Fig. 1: Dependency Graph Construction.

The procedure mentioned above is repeated for all use cases. As a result you get a table like the one in (Tab. 1). This dependency table is the starting point for the production of the dependency graph.

Tab. 1: Dependencies between Use Cases, Services, Functions and Components.

Construct dependency graph

For each component that is listed in the table you have to model the corresponding services, functions and use cases. This is performed like in the example in (Fig. 2). We start from the right of the graph with the Ceilometer component and the VM plugin and look which services are provided by those components: it is e. g. the “Ceilometer Monitoring” service. Therefore we draw an icon that represents this service and draw arrows from the Ceilometer and VM plugin components to the service icon (1). In the next step we look which function is provided by the Ceilometer Monitoring service. This is the “Monitoring of VM” function. Therefore we paste an icon for the function and draw an arrow to this function (2). Then we look for the use cases provided by the Monitoring of VM function. Since this is e. g. “Measure SLAs”, we paste an icon for this use case and draw another arrow to “Measure SLAs” (3). The first path between an use case and components on which it depends is drawn. This procedure is repeated on all components in (Tab. 1).

Fig. 2: Dependency Graph Construction from Dependency Table.

The result is the dependency graph shown below (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Dependency Graph of OpenStack Environment.

Add weight factors to use cases

Once the dependency graph is constructed, we can calculate the “impact” of component outages. When a component fails, you can simply follow the arrows in the dependency graph to see which user interactions (use cases) stop to be available for end users. If e. g. the Ceilometer component fails, you would not be able to measure SLAs, meter usage of Telco services or monitor the VM infrastructure.

But it would not be a very sophisticated practice to say that each use case is equally important to the end user. Some user interactions like e. g. creation of new VM nodes need not be available all the time (or at least it depends on the OLAs of the Telco). Other actions like e. g. Telco authentication must be available all the time. Therefore, we have to add weight factors to use cases. This can be done by adding another column to the dependency table and name it “Weight factor”. The weight factor should be a score measuring the “importance” of an user interaction in terms of business need. In a productive OpenStack environment, financial values (which correspond to the business value of the user interaction) could be assigned as weight factors to each use case. For reasons of simplicity we take the ordinal values 1, 2 and 3 as weight factors (whereby 1 signifies the least important user transaction and 3 the most important user transaction). For each use case row in the dependency table we add the corresponding weight factor (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4: Assignment of weight factors.

As a next step, we create a pivot table containing the components and use cases as consecutive row fields and the weight factors as data field. In order to avoid duplicate counts (of use cases) we use the maximum function instead of the sum function. As a result we get the pivot table in (Tab. 2).

Tab. 2: Pivot Table of Component/Use Case dependencies.

Calculate outage impacts

Calculation of system component outages is now quite straightforward. Just look at the pivot table and calculate the pivot sum of the weight factors of each component. As a result we have a table of failure impact sizes (Tab.3).

Tab. 3: OpenStack Components and Failure Impact Sizes.

This table reveals which components are very important for the overall reliability of the OpenStack environment and which are not. It is an operationalization of the measurement of “failure impact” for a given IT environment (failure impacts can be measured as number). The advantage of this approach is that we can build a test framework for OpenStack availability based on the failure impact sizes.

Most obviously components whith strong support functionality like e. g. MySQL or the Keystone component have high failure impact sizes and should be strongly protected against outages. VM internal components seem to be not so important because VMs can be easily cloned and recovered in a cloud environment.

In a further article we will show how availability can be tested with the given failure impact size values on a given OpenStack architecture.

In a former article we spoke about testing High Availability in OpenStack with the Chaos Monkey. While the Chaos Monkey is a great tool to test what happens if some system components fail, it does not reveal anything about the general strengths and weaknesses of different system architectures. In order to determine if an architecture with 2 redundant controller nodes and 2 compute nodes offers a higher availability level than an architecture with 3 compute nodes and only 1 controller node, a framework for testing different architectures is required. The “Dependability Modeling Framework” seems to be a great opportunity to evaluate different system architectures on their ability to achieve availability levels required by end users.

Overcome biased design decisions

The Dependability Modeling Framework is a hierarchical modeling framework for dependability evaluation of system architectures. Its purpose is to model different alternative architectural solutions for one IT system and then calculate the dependability characteristics of each different IT system realization. The calculated dependability values can help IT architects to rate system architectures before they are implemented and to choose the “best” approach from different possible alternatives. Design decisions which are based on Dependability Modeling Framework have the potential to be more reflective and less biased than purely intuitive design decisions, since no particular architectural design is preferred to others. The fit of a particular solution is tested versus previously defined criteria before any decision is taken.

Build models on different levels

The Dependability Models are built on four levels: the user level, the function level, the service level and the resource level. The levels reflect the method to first identify user interactions as well as system functions and services which are provided to users and then find resources which are contributing to accomplishment of the required functions. Once all user interactions, system functions, services and resources are identified, models are built (on each of the four levels) to assess the impact of component failures on the quality of the service delivered to end users. The models are connected in a dependency graph to show the different dependencies between user interactions, system functions, services and system resources. Once all dependencies are clear, the impact of a system resource outage to user functions can be calculated straightforward: if the failing resource was the only resource which delivered functions which were critical to the end user, the impact of the resource outage is very high. If there are redundant resources, services or functions, the impact is much less severe.

The dependency graph below demonstrates how end user interactions depend on functions, services and resources.

Fig. 1: Dependency Graph

The Dependability Model makes the impact of resource outages calculable. One could easily see that a Chaos Monkey test can verify such dependability graphs, since the Chaos Monkey effectively tests outage of system resources by randomly unplugging devices. The less obvious part of the Dependability Modelling Framework is the calculation of resource outage probabilities. The probability of an outage could only be obtained by regularly measuring unavailability of resources over a long time frame. Since there is no such data available, one must estimate the probabilities and use this estimation as a parameter to calculate the dependability characteristics of resources so far. A sensitivity analysis can reveal if the proposed architecture offers a reliable and highly available solution.

Dependability Modeling on OpenStack HA Environment

Dependability Modeling could also be performed on the OpenStack HA Environment we use at ICCLab. It is obvious that we High Availability could be realized in many different ways: we could use e. g. a distributed DRBD device to store all data used in OpenStack and synchronize the DRBD device with Pacemaker. Another possible solution is to build Ceph clusters and again use Pacemaker as synchronization tool. An alternative to Pacemaker is keepalived which also offers synchronization and control mechanisms for Load Balancing and High Availability. And of course one could also think of using HAProxy for Load Balancing instead of Ceph or DRBD.
In short: different architectures can be modelled. How this is done will be subject of a further blog post.

On the 19th February the 2nd Swiss OpenStack User Group Meeting took place. One of the presentations was held on Ceilometer by Toni and Lucas from the ICCLab. They talked about the history, the current and future features, the architecture and the requirements of ceilometer and explained how to use and extend it. You can take a look at the presentation here: